Food/Dining
As promised, I will talk about the food onboard. I can only speak to what I personally experienced. Also, much of this section is subjective. While I might have felt one way about something, the people at my table often would not agree with me.
I believed the food to be overall very good to excellent.
Breakfast
Breakfast is available buffet style in
Cabanas or a limited menu in
Lumiere's which is the Deck 3 Midship restaurant. I tried Cabanas the first morning aboard. I went down, picked out some pastries that looked good and went to the pool deck to eat. Yuck. This is the one area where I feel Disney dining really let me down. Their pastries were not very good. The funny thing is that one of the people I was sailing with LOVED the cinnamon rolls. I thought they were small and fairly dry/almost stale. Also, do not eat the Krispy Kreme donuts. As I've read on this board, they are frozen and then thawed out, and they absolutely taste like that. The texture is hard and not soft and fluffy like a donut should be. Speaking of hard textures, Disney cannot make a proper pancake. They are hard a dense and just gross. It is the one food item I will never order again if I go back on another
Disney cruise.
Cabanas does offer a LOT of variety including made to order omlettes and some items I found strange for breakfast but others might enjoy like baked beans. I don't really like eggs that much, so I skipped them completely this trip except when they were made into French toast. But I definitely think if you want a quick casual breakfast, you should be able to find something to eat here that will be to your liking, and you can always get different things to sample an see if you like them.
After deciding I wasn't very satisfied with my 1st breakfast at Cabanas, which was basically me taking a bit of this or that and rating them and realizing I only liked the hash browns and bacon, I went back downstairs to try the sit down breakfast at
Lumiere's. This atmosphere and also the menu much more suited my tastes. As I said, the menu is limited. I tried the french toast the first day and found that it was my favorite breakfast onboard along with a side of hash brown and bacon. This became my go to breakfast that I had 3 out of 5 mornings. It is beautifully made and an appropriate size (not a gigantic portion like some things onboard). The french toast is dusted with powered sugar and cinnamon and they serve it with a size of whipped butter and strawberry sauce. Delicious! They will pour warm maple syrup to your liking. Another thing I liked about eating breakfast in Lumiere's was I was able to get a cup of hot tea in a proper cup. They let you select your tea bag of choice and pour the hot water (which is really warm water) into the cup for you. The brand is Twinnings. You steep the tea to your desired strength. They do have cream and sugar/sugar substitutes on the table. Generally speaking, if you came fairly early to breakfast, the crowds were light and much quieter than on deck. It did pick up after 9 am.
One morning, I mistakenly tried the pancakes, and the last morning, their farewell breakfast does not include french toast in the restaurant. If fact, if you order waffles on the last day be prepared for toaster waffles (aka Eggos), because that is what you are going to get. The menu says "Belgian waffles," so I was expecting Mickey waffles. Nope. Plain old Eggos. However, they were still slightly better than the pancakes.
Lunch
There are a LOT of choices for lunches onboard. I believe lunch is offered in Lumiere's every day though I never made it there for lunches. To me, this was the most flexible meal with the best selection of choices.
Cabanas has an excellent buffet selection at lunch though I only ate there two days. There are plenty of choices: beef, pork, chicken, lamb, seafood, salads, and side dishes of all kinds. I really like that this is the one restaurant onboard with a hand washing station out front. At the others, they give you a hand sanitizing wipe instead.
Duck-In Diner had hamburgers, hot dogs, bratwurst, fries, chicken fingers, and schwarma (there might be more, but this is what I remember). I only tried the bratwurst, fries, and schwarma here. I would say skip the bratwurst (it had a bland flavor). The fries were great! And the scwarma was one of the favorite things I had. They have both chicken and lamb schwarma, and I had the lamb with the traditional tzatkiki sauce. I would eat it again. My only complaint was the pita pretty much feel apart, so I ended up eating it with a fork and knife which you might want to pick up if you get this dish.
I did not eat at
Daisy's Delights. In fact, I'm not sure I ever even found it.
Pinnochio's Pizzeria had pizzas that you could get by the slice or by the pie. It was a thin/hand tossed crust. Toppings were not skimpy. I tried both the barbeque chicken and traditional pepperoni pizzas here. They were good and VERY cheesy. Were they artisan pizzas? No. Were they better than the pizza you got from your school cafeteria growing up? Yes. They will suit most people though true foodies might not find them appealing.
Ice Cream
There are self-serve ice cream machines onboard. I never ate anything from them, because I am not a huge ice cream fan, and I don't really like using machines like that when little kids are using them a lot as they don't seem completely hygienic to me. They did have vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, and banana that I know of. I believe there may also have been a mango, but do not hold me to that.
Other Snacks
O'Gills Pub had snacks in the evenings in the corner of the bar. It was just simple fare mostly. Carrot and celery sticks, hot dogs, wings, nachos are what I remember. You could easily skip the sit down dinner if not super hungry and grab enough grub here to satisfy.
Cove Cafe had some small snacks. One night I went in there, and they just had some little plates with proscuitto and olives on it. But they did often have little sweet snacks that were tasty. I did not try their coffee.
Dinner
I ate in my assigned dining room each night. I had LAARL rotation with Reeves and Adroy (or maybe Adhoy?) as our serving team. Cedomir was our head server. Our table # was 40.
Lumiere's was our dining location our first and last nights, and it was by far my FAVORITE dining room. Our table was right by the front wall, and I could look out the window and see the piano in the atrium right by me. Dinners here were a little bit more what I would call classic cruise dining. I found the food good. I will note that the dining staff had no problems cooking meat to order as we had varying tastes from well down to medium rare at our table, and all the people were satisfied. The Grand Mariner souffle was EVEN BETTER than hoped. (I ended up having this desert 3 of the 5 nights--EXCELLENT). I did not like the deep fried brie. It was well made. I just did not care for it.. The red wine bosc pear salad was delicious, and the oven baked salmon royale might have been my favorite entree of the entire trip.
The dining room is themed but subdued. I honestly did not notice the touches in the lighting my first time in the restaurant. Make sure to look up.
I personally enjoyed this restaurant best because it did NOT include a show. We could actually have a conversation at dinner which was nice.
Animator's Palate
I first went inside this restaurant to decorate gingerbread cookies. It was the one Merrytime activity that I did and would recommend without reservations. The gingerbread cookies were fresh and delicious.
The first night in Animator's Palate we had the Sorcerer Mickey show and the 2nd night, we had Pirate Night (more thoughts on that later). I loved watching the different drawings come to life on the screen, and the show was good. The music and pictures put together were a surprising blend. But if you LOVE MICKEY as much as my friend does, TABLE #40 is the one to request. He came right in front of our table and danced there for several minutes. It was a special moment for my friend and for the rest of us who were enjoying her watch her favorite guy.
The food at Animator's was my least favorite. The black truffle pasta purseittes and foccacia bread were very good, but my favorite part of my main dish (the chicken) were the roasted beets on the side. My table mates LOVED the chicken and said it was juicy. I thought it was just ok and a little dry. So, I guess it depends on your standards and what you are used to eating.
We also had pirate's night menu in this restaurant. The only thing I really enjoyed that night was the Fennel, Orange, and Quinoa salad; I am still craving another serving of this salad. Unfortunately, this was also the night I had a lovely long black hair baked into one of my rolls. The head waiter brought me a plate full of delicious treats like macaroons and cranberry slices and something very chocolately. These are the types of deserts found in the Cove cafe. Yum yum yummy! I skipped desert from the menu and ate these treats instead.
Rapunzel's Royal Table
This is the newest restaurant on the Magic, and it is beautifully themed. My server said, "Welcome to the noisiest restaurant onboard," when we were seated, and he was not kidding. The entertainment here was good, and there was something the entire time we were there. Since we were on a 5 day cruise we had the full dinner show which features the thugs and the lanterns. They had singing, dancing, character interactions. I had a great character interaction with Hook Hand at our table. Rapunzel also stopped by, but Flynn Rider managed to escape. I had desperately wanted him to teach me how to smoulder, but it was not to be. [deep sigh]
The food was good, but I say this with a caveat. I got terribly sick not long after dinner. It was not seasickness. So, I don't know if I would eat the same things again as I'm not sure what caused my GI distress. I had the Snuggly Duckling Platter (skipped the duck pate) and the Flynn Rider Platter. Grand Mariner Souffle was brought over to me from Lumiere's...one thing I liked about my server.
Visually, this was a perfect 10. But I still preferred the more subdued atmosphere in Lumiere's.
Servers
Great service to one person is not as great to someone else. We had five people at our table, and four of them thought the service team was the best they'd ever had. The fifth one, myself, thought they were okay. I am the only one of the five who has been on another cruise line. I did NOT like that the server kept cutting everyone's meat for them. I thought it was weird and a little intrusive. The other four thought it was magical. I also did not like that I was often not treated like my own person. I was treated differently than the other couples, and it really bothered me. When I finally told the server I was completely ticked off, he upped his game. Reeves, our server, did some magic tricks at the table which were entertaining -- but they were mostly entertaining because of my friend's reaction.
Our assistant server was clearly still learning. He was not at the same level as the server. Neither could manage a simple cup of hot tea with dessert -- probably because Disney has them dancing around the restaurant half of the time. Again, the show in the middle of dinner was not my favorite element of the cruise. I much prefer a relaxed dinner with great service and good conversations. Our head server was excellent. He was very present throughout the cruise, and he is the only one of the three that made me feel like I mattered while the others made me feel like an afterthought.
I hear a lot of defensiveness whenever I point out simple facts about Disney vs other cruise lines, but it usually comes from people who have chosen
DCL as their cruise line of choice. One thing people seem to love is the rotational dining where you servers stay with you, but you have servers stay with you on the other cruise lines too when you opt for traditional dining; you just don't have to move dinner locations every night. For me, I thought the rotational dining was interesting. I believe it would get very old very quickly however if it was the same show over and over again....which takes us to... Pirate Night.
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